The young Kolkata trio of Ankik Dhar, Shilpa Goenka and Ankik's sister Anindyee, were at German Bakery on the evening of February 13, to usher in Valentine's Day.
All three youngsters were killed in the blast that ripped through the popular eatery that evening. Ankik, 24, an IIT graduate and a J P Morgan-staffer in Mumbai had driven down to meet his sister in Pune, like he always did during weekends, reports Pune Mirror. This time, say his inconsolable friends, he was accompanied by Shilpa, believed to be his fiancée, who worked in a Japanese finance company in Mumbai.
Incidentally, all three were students of the same school in Kolkata (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan) and both Ankik and Shilpa came to Mumbai in 2009 to pursue their dreams.
Anandi, 19, too joined Pune's Fergusson College in 2009. Sudip Dhar, Ankik's uncle, said, “Ankik was a very bright student who went to pursue his dreams in Mumbai. I cannot believe we lost him forever.” According to his teachers and friends, Ankik was a topper. “He was a brilliant student,” said Sukalpa Guha, Ankik's private tutor.
“He always scored the highest marks in mathematics but he was also good in other subjects. I have seen very few students like him.” Ankik was a nine pointer in IIT Kharagpore, said one of his closest friends Chiranjit Mukherjee. He excelled in Electronics and Communication Engineering, was an all-rounder with his good looks, amiable nature, and talent for drama and the arts.
“Ankik chose German Bakery to meet up with his sister because he was a die-hard foodie,” said Chiranjit. “He loved to try out different cuisines and restaurants and loved treating his friends and family to good food.” A weakness, said his friends, that may have cost him his life. The Dhars' Kolkata neighbours said that the family rushed to Pune to claim the bodies and the siblings were likely to be cremated there.
Ankik's father Amalendu Dhar works at ONGC in Kolkata. Shilpa's body will be brought to Kolkata on Sunday night. “We are extremely shattered. We can't believe that our friend is no more. We heard that the bag of explosive was lying under the table they were sitting,” one of Anandi's friends said while breaking down.
Fergusson College student Anindyee Dhar had asked for the definition of death in the last college lecture she attended on Friday, barely 24 hours before she became one of the nine victims of terror in Pune.
The 19-year-old Anindyee had asked for the true interpretation of death during a poetry class, her teacher recounted to Times of India on Sunday. Anindyee died along with her IIT-passout brother, Ankik, and three friends at German Bakery on Saturday evening.
“She seemed to have some kind of premonition. She spoke about death at length during the class that day. I was numbed when I came to know about her death the next day,'' her English teacher at college, Prasanna Deshpande, said on Sunday. “We were reading some lines from Robert Frost's ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening' and that triggered a discussion on life and death,'' Deshpande recalled.
“She was stuck on one of the lines: ‘Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here. To watch his woods fill up with snow,''' Deshpande said.
“I talked about the symbolism of the snow and the woods in the poem. Alluding to the lines, I tried to tell the class how the woods represented life and the snow symbolised death. It was then that she asked how anything covered with snow could still look beautiful; she explained that she wanted to know how life could be beautiful despite the fact that it was going to end in death. So I told her that life was beautiful because of the very fact that it's going to end one day. She looked satisfied and noted down the interpretation in her book,'' Deshpande reminisced.
